Stripe - Community Thoughts

cybershieldms

Want to share this with the ITFlow community as Stripe is available to integrate for payment processing.

I have a jewelry store retail customer that we set up last month with a point-of-sale system that uses a Stripe Connect application to let customers pay via e-mail/sms link or button on the customer portal. With 1 email and a very sutle alert on the Stripe Dashboard, Stripe decided that this Jewelry Store is violating their prohibited business policy. I helped the customer fill out the information requested, submit, status: wait 72 hours to process.

Well, apparently it went into limbo and 2 weeks later, payouts/deposits were suspended. After calling and emailing, the customer received an email this morning that his account will be terminated on October 3 for "we are unable to accept payments for stored value or credits maintained, accepted, and issued by anyone other than the seller." We've appealed and now waiting to see what happens.

My question for the ITFlow community before my MSP gets ramped up… has any ITFlow users had issues with Stripe? This definitely has me worried about using them, but I do want the credit card payment integration.

Thoughts?

wrongecho

Hey @cybershieldms

Firstly, thank you for your support - it means a lot 🙂

Unfortunately PayPal also has a track record of randomly closing down accounts. In both cases, legally speaking the money is surely 100% yours, but you'll have to fight to get it back :/. Gateways and acquirers take on a lot of financial risk when processing payments as disputes and fraud are always charged back to them, so they tend to be pretty heavy handed around their TOS.

From an ITFlow POV: I am generally against third-party integrations but things like authentication and payment have to be integrated to work properly. The most we can offer here is to allow different payment gateways/acquirers. I think the reason most apps support Stripe is that they provide the easiest API integration (to the point where if you login, their docs even update to match your api keys, so you can just copy-paste and have a working prototype in minutes), but this is a valid business risk and one worth considering. This risk isn't exclusive to payment processors.

As for Stripe issues - we've had none yet on the donation side. I'd be interested to hear what everyone else has to say.

johnny

Hi @cybershieldms Thank you so much for supporting the ITFlow project.

We have been using stripe with ITFlow for 2 years now and have not run into any issues

cybershieldms

Thanks @wrongecho and @johnny for the feedback!

For my customer (and myself too), I'm testing Helcim as an alternative payment processor. They have an API but also a javascript integration that looks promising… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n-auAgNwLA

wrongecho

cybershieldms

I attempted to sign up for an account with Helcim but they apparently do not support the UK…